Guitar Box

The box is together!!

Finished sides

The sides are now completely finished and ready for the top and back to be glued on.

Side Bending

I was extremely nervous for the step of side bending. I have heard of horror stories about cracking the sides. So I set up on the bending iron and began bending. I was surprised that it was not as bad as I had thought. Although my bending iron crapped out on me halfway through the second side. I was ticked because I wanted to finish the sides so bad. I therefore though of everything I could think of to use to bend. I wondered if Meieli's curling iron would work, or if the toaster would work somehow. I then remembered that I have a wood stove and could possibly use that if I stoked the fire up. To my surprise, it worked!!!.

I thicknesed the sides close to .9" and began bending. Here is the finished product.

Rosette, top bracing, back bracing

After thicknessing the top to to 1/8", I feathered down the edges using random orbital sander and 125 grit paper. This worked nicely and the edges are about 7/64". The next thing was to cut out the channels for the rosette and cut out the soundhole. We used the stew-mac precision router base, and the stew-mac rosette jig to cut the channels. It worked very well cutting very good channels with little tear-out. After installing the rosette purfling, we first scraped the wood and abalone down, and then finished with sanding it down. There are a few problems, but overall, a very good rosette for the first try.

Next it was time to rough cut the braces, radius them, and then glue them to the top using the go-bar clamping system. We also used a 30' diameter radius dish to achieve the radius on the top. This was not rocket science. The hard part was the final shaping and scalloping of the braces using only a chisel. It was extremely fun, but a little time consuming.

Next we thicknessed the back to 3/32" and feathered slightly towards the edges. THen using a 15' radius dish, we clamped the braces to the back side of the back side!